One Wall Street firm used a famous Mark Twain quote to explain the nervous behavior of investors this year

And everyone immediately started worrying that the health of the
US economy might not be great.

But over the last few weeks, we've seen some encouraging
signs suggesting that although the US economy is not super
great, it
doesn't look like we're heading for a recession.

Investors seem to have started to calm down a bit, a sentiment
that Don Rissmiller at Strategas Research Partners
captured perfectly when he wrote that "the U.S. economic data
today is that it has gone from 'mixed to bad' to 'mixed to
good.'"

But still, others are
nervous about the near future — especially with ongoing
stresses including
China and energy
markets, which have put pressure on the credit markets,
particularly junk debt.

To try and make sense of this, a research team
at Oppenheimer led by Chris Kotowski channeled a famous Mark
Twain quote to partially explain the psychology behind
why investors were so quick to jump out of markets at the
first sign of trouble in early January.

Here's Oppenheimer (emphasis ours):

Mark Twain once observed that "If a cat sits on a hot stove, that
cat won't sit on a hot stove again. That cat won't sit on a cold
stove either. That cat just doesn't like stoves." In
2008, a whole generation of investors sat on a hot
stove. The sub-prime market that was supposed to be
small and containable wasn't, and millions of investors got
burned. Thus, perhaps it should not surprise us that investors
have reacted with a hairpin trigger to what we view as reasonably
modest stresses in what strikes us as an overall good economic
picture. Nevertheless, we think the stove is cold,
particularly as it relates to the large US bank credit quality
outlook.

Basically, 2008 wasn't that long ago, and investors are
still very worried that they could be equally badly burned again.